Posts from — October 2009

I’ve finally figured out that Google Custom Search hates my weblog templates: it’s been broken, apparently for months.

I’ve now replaced it with Bing! from Microsoft. Give it a try and see if you don’t get much better search results than you had been getting.

There is still some integration work to be done. It would be nice to be able to go back to the search page easily. I’ll partly solve that by adding “related files” to the posts when you come in from a search engine.

But it is such a wonderfully elegant solution. It was hard not to like. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t currently come with ads. Plus, I find Bing to give me better results, almost as good as I get with DEVONagent.

(Yes, I know it’s from Microsoft and I’m a Mac & RedHat user. Don’t go hatin’.)

Ever wonder if timespans has any practical usefulness? Here is how I used timespans to clear up a communication problem in a global IT architecture group for an international bank.

Awhile back I worked with a group of IT architects at an international bank. The group, although “headquartered” in the US, had members in each of the bank’s regions.

This group had been trying to develop a Architectural Strategy. In that, they had some elements that were predetermined by the relationship they had with the outsource company that was handling IT support. They decided together that their Architectural Strategy would include:

• Technology Refresh Plans (TRP) which were part of the budget, done annually, and handled by the IT management company that had the outsource contract
• Current State Architecture (CSA) which would detail what was currently in-place
• Future State Architecture (FSA) of where the bank should be heading to achieve its business goals in the future
• Long-Range IT Plans (LRITP) that would help the bank achieve certain parts of its goals from “plateau” to “plateau”. These were semi-stable points that would achieve the goals of the Future State in small chunks.

But they couldn’t come to an agreement as to what any of these terms meant.

I was tasked with writing all of this stuff up. Try as I might, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Until I realised that timespan theory could unlock the whole problem. [Read more →]

For my American readers, you may be interested in a recent post on CalculatedRisk where CR graphs the recent BLS data on unemployment. The interesting things for you are the positive states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Virginia. And possibly Vermont.

Oklahoma looks pretty good to me too, having just talked to my old friends in Michigan.

Another interesting place is ShadowStats to see what the “real” unemployment picture looks like. It puts Michigan much higher than 25%. Which exceeds the Great Depression rates.

Then again, according to Shadow Stats, the US as a whole is pretty much already there.

[Read more →]

Dancing can work, though

Job hunters often get depressed from their hunt, and it’s probably even worse in a stagnant, depressed economy like we’re in today. One of the coping techniques that misguided but well-meaning people teach them is to use Positive Thinking. People regularly use these techniques and believe strongly that they are effective.

Nice, except that it will often backfire.

ScienceDaily reports that three Canadian researchers — Joanne V. Wood and John W. Lee (University of Waterloo) and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic (University of New Brunswick) — “found that individuals with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after repeating positive self-statements.”

Even people with high self-esteem didn’t get much benefit from repeating “self-affirming” statements.

Good grief! If something as beloved as Self Affirmation doesn’t work, can anything work?

It turns out the answer is “yes”, and luckily for us, it’s not that hard. It’s just a bit more complex than telling yourself “I’m a likeable person”.

It comes with some caveats.

[Read more →]

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends north of the border.

If your holiday is as great as ours, here’s SCTV’s “20 Depressing Hits by Connie Franklin” to help you celebrate.

Here’s a quick tip that I learned a few years ago to help you figure out what people in your company are making. This only works for US sites with foreign national workers.

It seems that whenever an H-1B visa is renewed or changed, the company has to post this information or make it available. I discovered this while working with a high-level corporate technical group of a massive, international company. I was having a coffee in the breakroom and, bored, was perusing the bulletin board. There was always someone selling something interesting, especially since so many of these people made high salaries and were often moved across the world. It was there that I saw my first H-1B declaration. I mentioned it to one of the guys I talked with in the group, who promptly got bent because the foreigner (an Australian) was pulling down $40k more than he was for the same job.

It looks like some obscure government document — which it is since the US has some of most nightmarish and stupid immigration laws of the developed world — but don’t let this fool you. Take a long look through it and, abracadabra! a salary number.

Of course, you may also get the shock that some of my friends at another company got when they discovered that the H-1Bs had multiple degrees and were working for half their salary, doing the same level work. Probably good to know, though.

I’ll close by saying that I’m all for foreign nationals coming to work in America, especially high level ones. Companies like Microsoft are finally wising up to America’s horrid immigration laws and moving highly technical centers to Canada. Screwing the foreigner or non-resident is the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on, albeit showing it in different ways.